GOP elite embraces Portman gay marriage switch

Not too long ago, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman’s endorsement of gay marriage would have sent a shockwave through the Republican Party. A cautious former Bush administration official, onetime VP short-lister and current vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee – breaking ranks on this?

Far from touching off a Beltway political firestorm, Portman’s announcement that he has a gay son and now supports same-sex marriage drew a muted or even positive response from his fellow members of the Republican elite.

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Rob Portman announces support for gay marriage

Gingrich stands firm on anti position

The reality Portman’s flip-flop exposed is this: among the Republican political community, the people who actually run campaigns and operate super PACs, support for gay marriage is almost certainly a solid majority position. Among strategists born after the end of the Vietnam War, it’s not even a close call.

In fact, some operatives who might have been in damage-control mode over Portman a few cycles earlier were publicly applauding the Ohio senator on Friday morning.

“I respect differing opinions on the topic, but it’s pretty difficult for me personally to disagree with any of this,” NRSC communications director Brad Dayspring wrote on Facebook, with a link to Portman’s revelatory op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch.

He elaborated in an email, emphasizing that he spoke only for himself and not for the committee.

“Very decent people have very different opinions on the issue, whether it’s generational or because of their geographic or religious background,” Dayspring told POLITICO. “Religious beliefs aside, I’m a conservative because of a belief in individual liberty, thus it’s difficult for me to accept that the federal government should have the right or authority to prevent any of my gay friends or family members from the ability to share their life with the person they love through a secular marriage.”

Dayspring – a former senior aide to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor – is hardly alone.

Polls show that the base of the Republican Party remains opposed to gay marriage, though open to civil unions between partners of the same sex. Some of Portman’s colleagues struck a moderate tone on marriage over the last week: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said the definition of marriage should be a state issue, while libertarian-leaning Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul floated the idea of removing marriage from the tax code and freeing adults to make marriage-like contracts for legal and financial purposes.

But the GOP’s professional elite is way past that point. In Washington D.C., it is probably more acceptable to favor gay marriage as a Republican consultant than to oppose it. The result is a Republican leadership class that’s sharply at odds, culturally, with the voters their party aims to lead.

A vivid illustration came just a few weeks ago, when in late February a throng of top Republican politicos signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to support a constitutional right to gay marriage. Among them were a half-dozen senior aides to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, which officially took the view that marriage is exclusively between one man and one woman.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, who opposed gay marriage in their campaigns for president and governor of California, respectively, also signed on to the amicus brief. So did several of the GOP’s most ubiquitous media strategists, including Alex Castellanos, Mike Murphy and Mark McKinnon.